In the papers my students submit at Paris III I have very often found references to a certain Gilles Deleuze. Intrigued, at one point I went to the closest public library, where I borrowed the two works by this author consecrated to the cinema.

The Movement-Image and The Time-Image ... I thought that, in the first volume, I would discover discussions of Renoir (the ballet of characters in Rules of the Game [1939] or The Golden Coach [1952]), Ophuls, Mizoguchi, Fuller or Téchiné; and, in the second, analyses of the art of von Stroheim, Ford, Duras, Pagnol, Rozier, Leone – the great masters of time. Well, there was nothing of the kind. The very opposite, in fact. Ophuls is only cited in The Time-Image and von Stroheim only in The Movement-Image. Pagnol, Rozier and Leone are entirely forgotten.

For Deleuze, movement is not movement, and time - in a less aggressive way, however - is not exactly time.

And to limit the close-up to the value of a response to an action (which is discussed in great detail over twenty-five pages) ends up by masking other usages of the close up in a very reductive way - more innovative and creative usages, omitted in the discussion. If a film begins with a close-up or consists of a sequence of close-ups, like the Hungarian film The Princess [Adj király katonát, Pál Erdöss] (1982) or even Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), the close-up is not inevitably a consequence of an action or the absorption of an exterior action. More than one hundred of Gérard Courant’s Cinématons (unique close-up sequence-shots of faces) are without reference to a prior or exterior action. The same applies to a character in close-up who eats, brushes his teeth, bites his neighbour or thumbs his nose at the audience. The latter is even a case of an action which provokes a reaction, the exact inverse of what Deleuze suggests - contradicted also by a pillow shot close-up, or an insert shot, or a lyrical suite of short, more or less identical close-ups, or even a shot of a man who gets whopped upside his head in frame. In this case the gap between action and reaction is imperceptible, on the order of a twenty-fourth of a second. And the action is in no way exterior.

These two modes of supposed dialectic, which Deleuze completes by a discussion of the couple shadow/light are founded on a certain specificity of the cinema, aligned to its grammar, its technique (découpage, close-up, focal qualities, lighting). Now it is pretty evident that in the cinema dialectical lines go beyond such specificities. This is why Deleuze quite properly includes a third form of movement-image, called the action-image, which (just as you would expect) has nothing in common with the popular definition of action in the cinema. Here it is a question of a dialectic between individual and society, detail and totality, particular action and general situation. When the cineaste leaves the individual in order to pay attention to society, this is called ‘the small form’ (Lubitsch would be, then, the champion of that) and when it is the opposite it is ‘the large form’ - and thus the super productions of Cecil B. DeMille are evoked at this point. The distinction is maybe a little pointless. If Male and Female (DeMille, 1919) indeed begins with some very generous shots (the sky, the sea, the Grand Canyon, a quote from Genesis), within thirty second we have come to the mop, the broom and the water bucket, and we remain there for all the rest of the film except for - right in the middle - the Babylon sequence. Theoretically this is the large form, but that boastful beginning is so brief ... It’s the same problem in a lot of American films, which begin by briefly presenting a city (Beyond the Forest [1949], Pride of the Marines [Delmer Daves, 1945], The Seven Year Itch [1955]) before attaching themselves definitively to an individual’s itinerary. The comings and goings of the particular get tangled up together and frequently get inverted, which means that disentangling the small form from the large is like establishing the priority of egg or chicken.

In this catalogue of dialectic movements you will note a host of notable omissions, like those dialectics founded on work practices, overplaying and underplaying (Kazan), visible-invisible (Tourneur), genre and non-genre (Monte Hellman); on grander ideas, nature and culture (Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932), city and country (Vidor), slowness and speed (Ford’s The Rising of the Moon, 1957), laughter and tears (Chaplin), present and past (DeMille), the trivial and the sublime (Godard), logic and absurdity (Buñuel, Hawks), love and action (Hollywood movies); or on ideological values, nationality and social class (The Grand Illusion, 1937), racism and tolerance (The Last Hunt, Richard Brooks, 1956), efficiency and justice (Touch of Evil, 1958); not to speak of those mediocre dialectics (good guys and bad guys, escape to Mexico or prison) that clog up the majority of screens. Some of these ought to rate a mention in this diptych with encylopaedic pretensions.

On the other hand, bizarrely wedged between the affection-image and the action-image, Deleuze has introduced a new category, the impulse-image, which belongs here like hair belongs in soup. Impulse, according to Deleuze, is aligned to naturalism where movement is created by the passage of human to beast (this pretty much proves that Deleuze doesn’t systematically reject dialectics with extrafilmic foundations, which he does leave out elsewhere for no reason).

This is a pretty fat hair follicle as well, since the bestial (in naturalism) is often set out at the beginning of films (Foolish Wives [1922], Yves Allegret’s The Cheat [Manèges, 1949]), and is thus not the result of a visible movement. But impulse and naturalism are actually two antinomic poles. For impulse - often the impulse of a character that echoes the impulse of the director - is a very long way from the principle of naturalism, which is that reality must be described with no interpretation deriving from the author’s mind. Thrill of impulse, chill of naturalism.

There isn’t any other explanation: the bordello baroque of Wind Across the Everglades in the truculence of Cottonmouth as he calls to the buzzards in agony, ‘Come and get me: swamp born, swamp fattened’ is closely akin to the grotesque enormity of Jarry, Hugo, Rabelais or Céline, and has nothing in common with the scalpel of a Zola. Ray displays a lyricism that expresses connivance with even the most negative characters.

Other supposed bards of naturalism: Fuller (who doesn’t flinch from any improbability, and directed the craziest of all films, Shock Corridor [1963], which features a black man who is an activist for the Ku Klux Klan), and Joseph Losey ...

You could maybe accept the epithet ‘realistic’ for Stranger On the Prowl (1953), The Lawless (1950) or The Big Night (1951) – realistic to the same extent as a multitude of cheap American or Italian films are – which Deleuze does not cite. On the other hand, the examples that he does evoke - Time Without Pity (1956), Secret Ceremony (1968), Eva (1962), These are the Damned (1962), Mr Klein (1977), or The Servant (1963) - have nothing truly realistic, much less naturalistic, about them. The latter two are fables, and the others are linked (like certain of their characters) to a totally unreal neurotic frenzy.

I will not linger further on the impulse-image, which constitutes by far the worst chapter of the Deleuzian diptych, so that we can get to the time-image.

Whereas up to now Deleuze has done his best to give us definitions of his neologisms, he is hardly so precise about what the time-image is. He defines time ‘as interval’ or ‘as whole’, (9) in short two extremes, day and night. The time-image: it makes me think of those green garbage bins into which, alongside the blue containers for old newspapers, the yellow containers for packaging and the white ones for bottles, you shove everything that does not belong somewhere else. You could make a negative definition for the time-image: it is everything that is not the movement-image or, more exactly, whatever is not subordinated to it (as is indicated on the cover of [the French edition] of Cinema 2: The Time-Image)(10), and which constitutes a centre, whereas the movement-image is in principle without centre. From the notion of a centre (‘interval’), which presupposes the existence of extremes, you pass to the notion of the ensemble, of a ‘whole’, which presupposes the non-existence of exterior elements. And the whole, that would be the result of montage, and that would also be time, because it is also montage which creates the time of the film. And the whole would be in direct relation to time. The whole and time moreover go pretty well together, since both - unlike movement - tend to escape us and to become indivisible and mysterious. We know almost everything about movement - if you relate this term (following the classic and non-Deleuzian definition) to space - above all since Magellan and Neil Armstrong, while past time is full of obscurities and we are always ignorant of the whole of future time, which - it is certain - will kill us.

You see that the time-image as Deleuze conceives of it in fact only exists quite rarely and often not where he has put it. Hegel told us that the whole is dialectic, and thus movement. Sometimes when you don’t perceive dialectical movement, it is because it is too subtle, too adroitly concealed. The director is a genius. Films like The Blind Owl (Ruiz, 1987) or Puissance de la parole (Godard, 1988) seem at first to be magmas (a term that fits them better than time-images), but an effort of analysis will clarify the lines of their dialectic fairly specifically. Pushing things a bit, I would say that the existence of the time-image only demonstrates the spectator’s inadequacy, even my own.

There is scarcely any time-image in the present-past equation (with the exception of Resnais) or in neo-realism, which Deleuze wrongly describes as the preamble to the time-image.

Deleuze - delusive Deleuze - gives words significations that have nothing to do with their current signification. Okay. But the catch is that in the heat of discourse he reintroduces these words with their current sense and reinforces his theses in this way, assured of the approbation of the reader who fully agrees with the underlined reappearance of the word in its ordinary sense. If you follow Deleuzian logic, you are lead to recognise that The Bicycle Thief and Voyage in Italy remain perfect examples of cinema-action. But since there is little action in these films, you are all the more willing to exclude them from that grid. By the same token, you will be tempted to include The Ten Commandments (1956) within the large form of cinema-action, because it is a very costly and very spectacular film. But the large form is actually the passage from the general to the individual, and that doesn’t happen in this film, since Moses evinces no behaviour that individualises him and always acts as the perfect robot in the pay of the God of Christ. Since the film wallows in the general and never gets out, you could think that it wasn’t the action-image but the time-image, with the magma typical of the elevated spheres of conventional religious dogma and Sulpician stylistics. (15) However, I would not go there - for this very expensive film is based on a very impoverished dialectic thread: the Christian God against the Egyptian God. But I would willingly argue that a film crammed with action like Quest for Fire (1981), precisely because it is nothing but action is not the action-image (through the lack of a dialectic between particular action and general situation) - still less the large form - and that it is the time-image, for I experience it like pure magma. And finally, one of the best examples of large form cinema-action is not a superproduction but a relatively cheap film, Forbidden Games (1951), with fifteen minutes of very violent war without protagonists at the beginning and afterwards the intimate itinerary of a couple of small fry.

At the end of the day, if you make an inventory of the stations of the time-image, you can define five sub-groups:

- The whole defined by montage, which is based (Deleuze recognises it himself) on prior dialectic movements and which, in general, can only servilely copy them;

- The whole defined by montage, which expresses itself by the creation of a tempo resulting from temporal dialectical lines (adagio-allegro), which Deleuze discusses very hurriedly, and which are also supported by montage;

- The whole defined by montage, which expresses itself by the creation of a tempo without dialectic: this is perhaps the case for Rozier, Pagnol, Leone, all forgotten by Deleuze, for Duras (whom he evokes in The Time-Image but always to cite dialectical movements between sound and image, between voice off and voice on, without discussing her work on the respiration of the film), and finally for von Stroheim (whom he limits, in a flagrant violation of commonsense, to naturalism without analysing the status of duration in his work);

- Totalising montage, which destroys - in the rarest cases - the dialectical vagaries of the scenario (Wild River, 1960);

- The whole defined by montage, and which excludes the dialectic; enter experimental cinema, Michael Snow, Serge Bard, Carmelo Bene, Garrel’s The Inner Scar (1971), The Woman of the Ganges (Duras, 1973), Kriemhilde’s Revenge (Lang, 1924), The Honeymoon Killers, The Age of the Earth (Rocha, 1980), Joan at the Stake (Rossellini, 1954) and also several spectacular turkeys in the manner of Quest for Fire and those gross American things (like the astonishing Evil Dead, 1983) that are just successions of violent acts.

In fact, those last three sectors alone make up the Deleuzian time-image, and are only very partially examined by Deleuze, who contents himself with some very pertinent remarks on Snow and Bene. It has to be said on his behalf that it is very hard to write about those films, which offer a smooth surface that does not lend itself readily to glossing.

The time-image thus essentially comprises films of ambition and films of high quality - which are fully worthy of being included under this heading - but which make up only a tiny fraction of the interesting films produced and an even tinier fraction of all the films produced. To separate the time-image from the movement-image, the magma from the dialectic, is thus a fairly pointless exercise (more so because the two are at times to be found in the same film). Even more pointless is to oppose them: that ends up like David and Goliath, 2D and 3D, man versus the Empire Brain Building. Whether it’s time or movement, with a centre or without a centre, doesn’t mean a whole lot.

And you have to be surprised that The Time-Image takes a hundred pages more than The Movement-Image. Deleuze must have been scared that his Time-Image was going to be too short, so he stuffed it full to bursting, laying things out in random order, it seems. The last three chapters of The Time-Image (thought, body and brain, components) overlap constantly, and these are the best ones (even though Ariadne’s thread traces a pretty devious path through some pretty arbitrary groupings: Doillon ranked only under the rubric of the body, for example). Deleuze does not spare the ink here in the attempt to stuff his things into just one of two big trunks.

In fact, you might think that the two titles are there because they sound good, to help Deleuze hawk his wares - an intrusive (and unconscious) MacGuffin, a little like the title Pierrot le Fou (1965) attracted cash and crowds to Godard’s film that never showed the celebrated homonymous bandit. The tragedy of Deleuze is that he crams his chapters full by injecting films and theses without regard to their topics, but also that he has to bugger things up (cf. Buñuelian repetition at the interior of naturalism, naturalism at the interior of the impulse ... ). Cram - you have to cram if you want to cover the whole of cinema in seven-hundred pages, and this is why you stick just one label - invariably the wrong one - on each item: Mizoguchi, small form; Ford, large form; Vidor, naturalist (along with the master of suspense, the Ozuian tatami shot, Fellinian fat girls). Still that pathological mania for classification. It’s also because Deleuze believes he is granting prestige to the cinema, for which it has utterly no need, by referring it to Bergsonian concepts. Of course it is actually Bergson, a philosopher without an audience (and a cinephobe), who benefits by this business. But extrafilmic thinkers adore this kind of equation which valorises them: not long ago some weird guy devoted a book to proving that Virgil foreshadowed the cinema because the writing in The Aeneid was like découpage.

Maybe you think I am too hard on Deleuze, but it is because his philosophic polish masks his real skills. Deleuze can be passionate, invigorating, if you clear out his stories about movement and time. Deleuze is like a Skorecki who thinks he is a Spinoza … The system is as void as the particular insights are exciting and stimulating (not always, but very often).

First off, this is perhaps the only theoretician of the cinema who relies exclusively on good films or ambitious films, from the immediate present (Syberberg, Straub, Jacquot, Eustache, Garrel) as well as from the past. Where Metz, Cohen-Séat, Marcel Martin and Arijon wallowed in turkeys, with him you are always in good company, with family. Deleuze is a cinephile, and he likes good cinema.

For another thing, he knows how to dig up the most interesting ways of looking at a film from somewhat overlooked journals like the old Cinématographe and Etudes cinématographiques, how to make a synthesis of the best citations from quite varied sources dealing with a single auteur.

And above all, how to express his own original, if generally oblique, points of view on films. It is often during desultory conversation, in impromptu remarks, where the most nourishing stuff can be found, badly classified and badly set out on the page in too few paragraphs (the final summary is often more useful for following Deleuze’s thought than the text itself), but what does it matter ...